What Connection Have You Found Between the Ways in Which Heaney and Sheers Write About Childhood? in Your Response Include Detailed Critical Discussions of at Least Two of Heaney's Poems

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Heaney is a Catholic Northern Irish poet born in 1939 as the son of a farmer, and many of his early poems note his closeness with nature and family influence during childhood. This is why I chose two of his earlier poems " Blackberry Picking" and "Death of a Naturalist" to illuminate his descriptions on childhood. I will be comparing this with Owen Sheers' poem "Hedge Schools" which also has a description of childhood and is often said to have been inspired by "Blackberry Picking". He is a welsh poet and author born in 1974. All three poems manage to display how as children they were exploring the natural world around them, Heaney exploring the "Frogspawn" and both Sheers and Heaney picking "blackberries" which are seen as childhood experiences. This exploration seemed to lead to them all finding something "dark" inside them as they begin to mature. In "DoaN" Heaney uses war like imagery such as "cocked" and "mud grenades", this may allude to the civil war in Ireland at the time as Heaney begins to see the world isn't as simple as "Miss Walls" would tell him. He is beginning to see that procreation does not happen because a partner "croaked" and in "BP" we see further how his innocence is being lost and he is learning about sexuality in the nouns "lust" and "hunger. They manage to illustrate how Heaney is developing a desire for sex which conflicts with his original childish adventures and shows the developing confusion he went through as he grew older. We again see that Heaney is developing a taste for adulthood as he uses the simile "sweet like thickened wine", which is beyond his years at that point and hints once again towards both an inevitable loss of innocence and a desired stride into adulthood. The long sentences in the first stanza manage to illustrate the simple easy nature of childhood and the freedom available to you and the shorter more direct

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